VAX Users See the Writing on the Wall

Snot Locker writes "An informative piece at ComputerWorld talks about how VAX users are anticipating the costly migration to more modern systems. Several noteworthy tidbits, including hints of the port of OpenVMS to Itanium and the tale of VAX systems that have not had a reboot in 6 years!"

Comments

Interesting question.

[daviddennis]

A few answers:

(1) People without significant training and heavy motivation could not learn how to use computers in the "good old days". We only had a market of maybe 30% of the population capable of using them. For computers to spread throughout society, this was not good enough.

The computer industry wanted to spread, for financial reasons if nothing else, and so they made the changes needed to make computers easier to learn and use for non-experts.

(2) Marketing. People want pretty things. People can be convinced to upgrade to something "better" by giving them more pretty things. Even if the old, cerebral games were more fun, the new, slicker graphical games took over the world because they were pretty, and because many of them took advantage of people's natural desire to shoot other people. (I have never understood this, personally, but it's the truth).

I have thought many times that older computers are better, mainly because they were more reliable, and sufficiently simple that a reasonably normal person could understand how they worked, and how to fix things if they broke. Today, I doubt that any single person understands everything going on in a contemporary operating system.

Few people seriously want to go back to the old days, when 24x80 terminal screens that cost as much as a used car were all the computing even well-connected people could have at their homes. I have to admit that I'm nostalgic enough to try and find a good used MicroPDP-11 on eBay, just to say I have one. That being said, I'm not sure how much use I would make of it, and all the weird programming restrictions would surely be archaic. But it would still be nice to have an example of computing history, when we all feltl like elites who might somehow wind up changing the world.

D

Great System

[kbarrett]

VMS was a great operating system (except for I/O throughput). Anyone that was an engineer at DEC would say so. It was COMMON for those systems to stay up for years without a reboot (software upgrades did nto need rebooting), and it had a lot to do with the design of the software and the developers rather than the hardware. The OS had proper protections of resources and privileges, software was released with the constant concern of migration or backward compatibility, and languages all had a common call API -- making it easy to link objects compiled in different languages. Commands were user-friendly, and the GUI (if you wanted it) was X (Motif at that time). Remember that you could also not just control user privs, but about 32 other items such as disk quota, how much memory they could consume, the maximum CPU time before being forced to swap, etc. From a business perspective, a multi-user, time-sharing, reliable, networking (supported TCP/IP, LAT, DECnet, SNA, ...), and popular (DEC was #2 in the world) system was a good choice. The enemy was the mainframe -- a non-dristributed, expensive investment. It's sad developers that did not grow up in this environment will not be able to see it as anything but old technology.

BTW -- yes, Y2k had little to no impact on VMS. It was designed to be date "correct" from the beginning. Extremely few Y2k patches for VMS appeared, and they were mostly for applications rather than the OS.

What killed VMS was being tied to the expensive hardware it ran on. When support for a sytem costs you 5-6 figures a year compared to buying a Linux/NT server for $1-$5k brand new, plus the VAX hardware was not compatible with other systems (except for the Alpha perhaps), you had to question it's value in your server room. Don't forget the large power consuption of the older systems as well.

If DEC had been allowed to release VMS for Intel as a product (which DID exist as a prototype within DEC), it might still be a viable choice today. I understood this did not happen due to the agreement between Microsoft and DEC when they partnered to port applications to NT and cross-train personnel for PC support -- a smart move on Microsoft's part, as it would certainly have prevented NT from catching on.

Even now Linux and Microsoft strive to achieve the same level of clustering integration VMS enjoyed almost transparently. Unix/Linux is much more flexible and efficient and cost-effective, but this comes at a trade-off of being more technical to use and with less administrative control. Eventually the "lack of applications" problem will fade away.

Hopefully Linux adoption can return us to those "no Microsoft products in use here" days.

Keith-who-was-a-VMS-product-developer-and-admin- at -DEC